The Death of Stalin
2017 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Armando Iannucci
When dictator Joseph Stalin dies, his parasitic cronies square off in a frantic power struggle to become the next Soviet leader. As they bumble, brawl and back-stab their way to the top, the question remains — just who is running the government?
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And of course there's Death of Stalin where everybody just uses either their own accent or they're Jason Isaacs who went for over the top Yorkshire.
I love creative accent work in movies. I recently watched Pride and Prejudice, and Donald Sutherland clearly isn't doing an English accent but it works somehow.
The only film I saw in an empty theater was 'The Death of Stalin'. That was kind of odd but a decent film regardless.
Death of Stalin is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. It's been a long time since I laughed so hard at a movie or TV show.
The last comedy that I saw that matches your description is American Fiction. It didn’t feature too many laugh out loud moments, but it was thought provoking and well done. And yet, 93% from critics and 95% from audiences.
I wonder if audiences can appreciate these movies more than you give them credit for?
Let’s try a few more
- Death of Stalin (94%, 79%) has the pattern you’ve predicted.
- O Brother Where Art Thou? (78%, 89%) has the opposite of the pattern.
- Grand Budapest Hotel (92%, 87%) was appreciated by both, like American Fiction.
I’m just not seeing a pattern here. Looking at comedies that fit your description the critics and audience scores don’t follow a predictable 95%, 70% pattern.
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
The civil war between the competing factions behind the scenes when he kicks it should at least make for some good entertainment. So we have that to look forward to.
I expect it to make the film Death of Stalin look like a depiction of an amiable, staid, and sensible process purely in service of the public good, by comparison.
I'm not a movie critic, so it's hard not to be vague, I was just reporting on my own take and experience.
For a better arthouse movie, someone in this thread mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin! which was indeed excellent.
For better directing and acting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin used real characters in a real situation, though with a dark-comedic take. Absolutely awesome.
I really appreciate works like Death of Stalin that are more than happy to move things around in the name of entertainment. It isn't a documentary so it has the freedom to get creative and hit the key notes rather than pure accuracy. They also just said "No need to have Russian accents, the audience is smart enough to just go with what you have."
Iannucci's Death of Stalin has the advantage that it's all history - it can't become more ridiculous after he made the movie because it's in the past. But of course the reality is more or less as absurd as the movie, although different in important ways. (Lots of the timing is completely wrong, events are re-arranged, people are shuffled about so that fewer actors play more important roles) but it does have the advantage that yeah, Stalin can't have another even more ridiculous life which makes the movie seem tame, he's dead.
Yup. And started using captured Panzerfausts to make flank progress from basement to basement. Blasting through walls.
The list of Red Army improvisations and peculiarities during WW2 is huge and impressive, with several of them having significant impact:
* Later war, setting off kerosene fires on their tanks at the start of action, which made enemy gunners think the tank had been knocked out. "Why is the dead tank moving?" might seem obvious, but remember it's not uncommon for a knocked out tank to continue to advance, even with the crew mulched. So, short of ammo, which the Germans most certainly were, no one risked a follow up shot . . until the Russian machines were on top of them.
* It also turned out that sunflower oil worked great as bolt lube, and although "the Ivans" were basically starving the entire time, Red Army always seemed to be able to find sunflowers.
* Grenade improvisations: several ingenious incendiary layouts and formulations including many with powdered aluminum and elemental sodium; more than a few molotovs had mixes that when ignited were basically chemical weapons; harnessing (fish?)hooks to thrown grenades (to catch on netting and slats, to explode higher) against embrasures; improvised shape charges from recovered plastic explosive (reverse-engineered from Faustpatrones); wooden cases for mines and incendiaries to evade magnetic sweeps.
* There's more artillery improv than I could list here. The Red Army seemed much more canny with smoke and flare than the Wehrmacht did, perhaps because the German infantry had a very strong reliance on offense and, well, shooting straight. Red Army made no such assumptions. Probably the best known arty "invention" is the double-usage of corps-level artillery like the 152 mm (ML-20) as self-propelled assault guns that accompanied smaller groups as surprise antitank guns or as good old fashioned bomb tossers. A surprising number of life's problems can be eliminated by yeeting 50 kgs of high explosive at them.
* The 7.62×25mm Tokarev was (is) an extremely spicy pistol round, and made the massed SMG fire of Red Army conscripts as much as 20% longer ranged than the enemy's 9×19mm equivalent. Not until the 7.62mm Kurz would (some) German infantry have better automatic fires at the individual level (although German GPMGs - specifically the MG-34 and particularly the MG-42 - were almost certainly the best of the war). Konev was aware of this range difference between PPD/PPSH/PPS and MP40, although he felt that the Russian round's advantage was in greater cover penetration (which, honestly, he might have been right on that, busting cover creates a lot of secondary fragmentation - see also youtubes re: "could you survive in a shot up car"). You know what they say about imitation: Wehrmacht troops would fill their hands with PPDs at the first opportunity, which says a lot.
* The overpowered 14.5×114mm anti-tank rifle (PTR series) stayed relevant long after the equivalents in German (using 7.92x94mm Patronen) and British (using .55 Boys) service passed into obsolescence, and was pressed into all sorts of usages: anti-aircraft, extremely long range anti-personnel, and what we would today call anti-materiel (radio masts, landing lights, map boxes, fuel dumps)
* Something more tactical they started doing towards the end of the war was to "fight out" an enemy unit but leave a tunnel through the envelopment. While it seems inferior to destroying the force, the Red Army found that destruction of a unit that started in good fighting trim was generally not worth it, and you would be better off having them route (losing heavy equipment, fuel, and most weapons) into their supporting units, where they would dilute stores. It's one of those little tweaks that shows just how much freedom Stalin was giving his commanders towards the end of the war. He'd come down on the entire country like a ton of bricks after the surrender, of course, and the Red Army would wait another fourteen years for their revenge on Beria. Death of Stalin is not a documentary, but it gets the rhythm exactly right, even if it's tightly compressed.
Reading about WW2's Eastern theatre is always frickin' haunting to me, no matter how jaded I think I am. I know: we've had recent campaigns fought at that intensity - Fallujah comes to mind, Shahikot valley too - but nothing that went on and on and on with millions of people for years and years without pause. Two peoples, each bent on the other's destruction. Like Rwanda with white people; pre-1945 Europeans did not dick around. I should say pre-nuke Europeans. Human-powered genocide got obsoleted right quick in 1945.
Andrea Riseborough plays her brilliantly in the wonderful Death of Stalin movie.
And in between Veep seasons made The Death of Stalin [1] in 2017: Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev is all I have to say.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
I guess a more recent film is almost impossible to make you feel the same "feeling" again when watching it. But close calls I would say would be:
- Wag the Dog (1997)
- In the Loop (2009) [the closest, in my opinion]
PS: The Death of Stalin (2017) and Don't Look Up (2021) also try, but I think they don't manage to get that close.
I would also say that Coen brother's works, also of high quality and appealing to a similar-minded crowd, though are completely different animals.
Has Putin not seen the fate of Beria in the film "The Death Of Stalin"? How long will it take before the Red Army takes him out into the back yard and shoots him?
Edit: Usual Putinista downvotes. Get a life. Why do you support this evil man?
Yes! The Death of Stalin is a wonderful movie.
I'm eagerly awaiting the take on this for the Trump years. Can you imagine having actor comedians play Spicer, Scaramucci, a constantly exasperated Gen. Mattis, etc, etc?
IMHO the best view of Stalin and Stalinism, and certainly the funniest if your taste is for black humor is the film "The Death Of Stalin" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin often available on streaming services. A new version with s/Stalin/Putin/ would be good, and perhaps given oligarchs etc. even funnier.
Every era is an era of horrible films. That’s Sturgeon’s law for you.
Looking at the 2010s as a whole, we got to watch some amazing films.
We got great hard sci-fi like Gravity, Arrival, Ex Machina. The coming of age genre saw entries like Ladybird, Eighth Grade and Booksmart. Animation reached new heights with films like Inside Out, Spider-Man into the Spiderverse, and Kubo and the Two Strings.
We got comedies like The Artist, Grand Budapest Hotel, Death of Stalin, and Jojo Rabbit. Dramas like Moonlight, Fences, Spotlight, Parasite, Blue Jasmine.
Even in the ever-popular comic book genre, we got Logan and Joker playing at a very different level.
But also, it was the decade of the MCU. Let’s not underestimate what Disney has achieved with that — one big overarching story spanning over twenty films, bringing much deeper character development and more serious themes than what we’d gotten used to from blockbusters.
For Soviet-era black humor, it's hard to beat the 2017 movie The Death of Stalin.
Parajanov's works are also incredible. A lot of his stuff was not "acceptable" in the U(kr)SSR because of their regionalism and stark non-realist aesthetics, but Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a fascinating and gorgeous look at traditional Ukrainian folktale and visual culture.
If you like Hard to Be A God, you should check out Aleksei German's other films, especially Khrustalyov, My Car! from 1998, which is nominally a comedy film, but plays much more like a surrealist horror film that riffs endlessly on the Kafkaesque paranoia of Stalinist Russia. It would make a brilliant double feature with Iannucci's Death of Stalin from 2017, which was definitely influenced by German's film.
Death of Stalin. Really good movie.
Hello to Jason Isaacs.
Death of Stalin, Booksmart, Jojo Rabbit are definitely smaller independent comedies, but compare:
The Artist: $130M gross, $15M budget Knives Out: $311M gross, $40M budget Birdman: $100M gross, $18M budget Grand Budapest: $173M gross, $25M budget Midnight in Paris: $154M gross, $17M budget Superbad: $170M gross, $20M budget
All of those are in the same rough ballpark, but Superbad had 70% of its box office revenue in the US+Canada.
Compare Grand Budapest and Birdman, which only saw 40% of their takings in NA. Midnight in Paris comes in at 37%, and, as a European production, The Artist saw only 35%-ish of its revenue in NA. Even Knives Out, the most hollywood-y of the lot, came in at 53% revenue from NA.
Superbad is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood sensibilities, so it obviously performed best in the US, and it's obviously become a cultual touchstone there — but I personally only even heard about it relatively recently. All the other films performed much better elsewhere so obviously don't seem to have had as much of a cultural impact from a US-centric perspective.
You're not helping your argument though.
Those were great films, however, they were niche.
'Superbad' was a big, hollywood thing. A cultural touchstone that we remember, make jokes about, memes.
Very few people ever saw Booskmart or The Death of Stalin.
The Globalization of Hollywood - and increased cultural sensitivities have changed this.
Comedy doesn't cross borders as well as Thor.
Without going into details, cultural sensitivities and fear of Twitter mobs is a 'fundamental' issue. It's not a side issue it's a primary driver. Have a listen to the podcasts and talks by various comedy writers, you can see the evolution.
People with power have their knives out to destroy others - some of them obviously need to be cancelled, and some others raise some questions, but there are very, very few left with the power to make the jokes they want. Everyone else has to kowtow in fear. Comedy requires 'absolute safe spaces' in order to work, particularly writers rooms, which, if we could record what they say ... my god we'd all be offended.
I'm hoping that this will just be a 'phase' but I'm afraid it may not be as the issues overlay with ostensibly historical issues of social justice, and as soon as we broach that domain, everything becomes deadly serious and we all act like good corporate citizens.
It may very well take an established 'provider' like a different kind of Netflix with a different set of sensibilities.
Edit: listen to Tina Fey and Judd Apatow podcasts and less public interviews, they hint at the shift while being very polite about it.
Comedies have most certainly not died. They've just changed in tone.
A few highlights from the last decade — Booksmart is a very different take on the teenage buddy comedy. Jojo Rabbit and The Death of Stalin are some of the darkest black comedies I've ever watched, which would never have gotten made in the 90s. Birdman is completely surreal. The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of most joyous films to watch I know of, and The Artist is a comedic love letter to the silent era.
They “failed” in poisoning him first. Then they let Navalny “flee” to Germany. And then they “confessed” to said failed poisoning attempt.
The Russians have become either: a) an incompetent joke given their historical track record of assassinations and coverups (too many to list)
b) Navalny is seeking to be in the limelight and faking all or part of this for some manufactured consent
This would not have been a subplot in a Le Carre novel.
This is the perfect monkey wrench “plot” to dismantle the Nord Stream pipeline:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream
For those who would want to watch a dark comedy on Soviet political machinations I highly recommend “The Death of Stalin.”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/
Pre 1989 under Iron Curtain pretty much _everything_ was illegal. Any activity not aligned with primary party goals and thinking lines had some paragraph attached to it. It all stemmed from the "mother country", Stalins Russia. As Beria used to say "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime". Thats Lavrentiy Beria, head of Secret Police under Stalin, and the father of Katyn massacre - murdering 22K Polish military officers with a shot to the back of the head and burying bodies in a forest mass graves.
The Death of Stalin (2017) is a lighthearted movie showing the tragedy, farce and terror of living under Soviet rule.
If you haven't heard of them, The Thick of It is basically a modern version of this show. By Armando Ianucci, the man who went on to make Veep (with Julia Louis Dreyfuss). Both series have been praised by insiders who say "The show is just like what happens in reality!".
He's also made the movies "In The Loop", set in the run up to the Iraq War, and "The Death of Stalin".
Trying to profit from someones death is unfortunately as old as mankind. From the company that orchestrated and managed the recent funeral of Muhammad Ali (against the best wishes of his family) to conspiring surrounding the death of Stalin. This dark comedy “The Death of Stalin” explains it best:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/
The company that controlled the funeral of Muhammad Ali:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authentic_Brands_Group
If you have not watched it, the movie The Death of Stalin is great, mostly historically accurate, though not in the depiction of the characters, and extremely funny. Zhukov is represented as a hilarious bully who intimidates the whole politburo.
I hate it when movies try to portray foreign language speakers as speaking accented English. That’s not how any of this works!
If they want to go for accuracy, the actors should speak the actual language. Provide subtitles for outside audiences.
Otherwise, just have the actors speak normally. It’s no less authentic than speaking with an accent, and the actors can focus on acting.
Another prominent Soviet example of doing this well is The Death of Stalin. You actually get a sense of the people as real people instead of scary foreigners.
And for a little background, even though Svetlana is a relatively minor character in it, don't miss The Death of Stalin - surely one of the best black comedies of recent years.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/
One of the under the radar movies I watched lately was Death of Stalin, and true beauty of this dark comedy was the simple fact that none of the actors tried to speak English in a Russian accent and on top of it, there is a mix of British and American accent depending on the actor. This made the movie truly enjoyable and free from pretense.
That explains why the story is in fashion at the moment. But regarding the movie, see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin#Historical_accuracy
"the film is "fundamentally ill-equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing marks it doesn't know it should be aiming for.""
In short, it doesn't give a real insight, even if it entertains. The film is anyway based on a comics:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mort_de_Staline_(bande_dessin%C3%A9e)
Which starts with: "Although inspired by real events, this story is nonetheless a fiction, freely constructed according to a fragmentary documentation, sometimes partial and often contradictory ... The authors point out, however, that they hardly needed to force their imagination, being unable to invent anything equivalent to the furious madness of Stalin and his entourage"
It's a fiction, even if there are surely the facts that are even weirder than many are able to imagine and the facts that are much harder to casually talk about.
This episode is also prominently featured in the highly recommended masterpiece "The Death Of Stalin", a dark satire movie on Stalin and Berisha.
FWIW, 88 metascore on Metacritic [1] is solid, high. Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev! Can't wait.
[1] http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-death-of-stalin
Yeah, I'm not sure "communist" was ever a particularly valuable label, in that anything large and nominally communist was more statist or totalitarian oligarchy, just painted red. My understanding is that as envisioned, the state would "wither away", devolving power to the people, but in practice people who like power were quite happy to seize the levers of the government and never let them go. Oopsie!
As an aside, I strongly recommend Iannucci's The Death of Stalin [1], which is in US theaters right now. The material would be horrific in a serious film, but treating it as a black comedy makes it endurable. I enjoyed it much more than I expected, and the cast is first rate.
[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_death_of_stalin/